I glanced over at Johnny Thresher, sitting with an arm draped casually over the back of the chair next to him and the other resting on the papers on the table. He could have offered to leave the room. I was glad he hadn’t and that Bert hadn’t insisted he do so.
“Do you mean did I notice any slapping, punching, battering, any…police brutality?” I took pleasure in articulating those words slowly and carefully. I remembered how Johnny had pounded the guy half-silly against my porch railings.
I met the cold and watchful blue of his eyes and smiled, not nicely, and let the silence build.
His face remained impassive, but his knuckles whitened. The slow clenching of his fist warned me that there might be more at stake here than I realized. Maybe the usual federal/local resentments. Maybe history. Maybe just unfortunate timing. Unspoken words like suspension and disciplinary action quivered in the air. So did payback.
My petty chance. I took it.
28.
“Why, no,” I said mildly, turning my gaze back to Bert Wiggins. “If that weasel has any bruises, he probably got them when I knocked the legs out from under him. He went ass-over-kettle and slammed himself against the porch pillar, rather hard, actually. In fact, I was afraid for a moment the roof was going to collapse on us. It’s an old porch, you know. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear before. Sergeant Thresher had to use force to compel him but it was certainly not excessive. In my opinion, Sergeant Thresher was most professional when he restrained the suspect.”
I looked at Johnny Thresher and smiled again, as sardonic as I could make it.
“As his conduct always is,” I added.
Bert glanced at Johnny and then at the tape adorning my temple. He nodded. “The perp tried to mule-kick me when I was putting him in the cruiser. Thanks, Lillie. Even if the sergeant here isn’t formally attached, after the guy in the courthouse dying in custody, we don’t need more shit.”
I heard a chair scrape as I followed PC Wiggins to the noisy hallway, but I didn’t spare a further glance to check if coals smoldered on Johnny Thresher’s dark head.
Outside, before he hared off, Bert said, “I’ll have a statement for you to sign just as soon as I type it, if you don’t mind waiting. We get these bullshit claims. Let me give you a heads-up. We may want you on this missing kid case. It’s been forty-eight hours.”
That meant the initial search through parks, vacant lots and backyards and fields, through shed, garages, dank warehouses and abandoned buildings, backyards and basements, had come up empty and they were afraid the child was dead, the body hidden. They hoped my peculiar Talent for seeing and hearing ghosts could facilitate discovery before the crime scene was too much degraded by time, weather and animals to provide useful evidence.
I hate missing child cases.
Too often, they ended badly. And few things are more hideous than the discarded, battered body of a child. But body finding was one of the services I provided to Waredale PD.
His news jolted my troubles into perspective though. I wasn’t a helpless child.
I was standing out of the way looking at the notices on the bulletin board but seeing nothing, steeling myself for the discovery of a pitiful cringing little ghost near a mangled, tortured body, when I heard my name, in a manner of speaking.
“Rhoda, get on the horn and find the Freak. Might as well get her started.”
I looked over my shoulder. The fat sergeant, Sullivan—the one with the irritating tenor, the one who’d confiscated the shotgun after the zombie incident—leaned against the counter. Bert’s arrival with the statement to sign saved me from saying anything stupid in response. Everyone was on edge and didn’t need me to have a shit-fit over nothing.
It appeared he was acting chief of the detachment, like Ted had said. I hoped it was temporary. Some cops were suspicious of Talents. Sullivan was obviously one of them. Sullivan had the grace to look embarrassed when Rhoda advised him, in her usual sharp tone, that he could brief me himself, since I was standing right behind him.
Sullivan gave good report, I had to admit.
The missing child, Tiffany Ann Taylor, had been last seen at a community playground Saturday morning. One of her frightened friends revealed she’d been taunted and chased by a couple of bigger kids who called her “pissy pants” and other names and pushed her off the swings and the slides until she’d run off crying.
When interviewed, the truculent culprits—a brother and sister—claimed they’d only followed “the little freak” a short way along the street before they gave up, satisfied with their morning exercise.
Tiffany never arrived home.
Tips called in to a hotline offered the usual conflicting information: the child was seen at a bus stop with a bearded male; also hustled along a sidewalk in the grip of a cadaverous woman—not bearded, surprisingly; the child was waving frantically from the window of a speeding red car driven by a foreign-looking man.
I examined her school picture. Fine, messy, wheat-colored hair, pale blue eyes, waiflike features. Eleven years old but small for her age. A homely child with the bones that would make her a beauty by the time she was twenty. A type that seemed to attract a certain type of predator.
After he’d provided me with the child’s name and photograph, and outlined the circumstances and the search so far—information he delivered and directed to a point beyond my right shoulder—Sullivan had questions. One being: did I require any article belonging to the missing child?
“I don’t hunt by scent,” I said. “But I will need an escort with a leash.”
Rhoda snorted, then surprised me by giving me a thumbs-up behind Sullivan’s back. She might not like me, but apparently she liked Sullivan even less. Bobby had worn big shoes. Any replacement would have a hard time filling them.
Sullivan sucked his teeth but finally met my gaze. His expression said he thought a muzzle would be more appropriate. “We’re man-short, Ms. St. Claire. We’ve been pulling double shifts as it is. We can provide you with a two-way, but…”
“I’ll provide the escort for Ms. St. Claire and handle the radio contact.” Johnny’s voice, with an edge to it, above my head.
Sullivan frowned and thumped fingers on the counter. He gave Johnny a territorial stare. “I thought you were…?”
“All taken care of. Ms. St. Claire’s Talent has a bad effect on radios, which is one of the reasons she needs a ‘leash.’”
I shrugged, my mind on the child. I needed an official presence. If Johnny were all that was available, I’d have to swallow my chagrin and make do. The missing child took infinite priority over the fact that right now I hated Johnny Thresher’s guts.
“Whatever. I’ll wait outside,” I said, and escaped.
I stopped dead halfway across the parking lot. Staring up at the hazy sky, I tried to retrieve a flash of thought, an image that that swung like a bough in the wind. What was its connection?
A stride of footsteps behind me. A body, out of focus, blocked the sun. I ignored it, following the clairvoyant thread.
Johnny’s distant voice, stiff and formal, disturbed the wavering air. Distraction.
“That was an interesting choice and interpretation of fact for young Wiggins, Ms. St. Claire. Thanks.”
“You should be familiar with it, Sergeant. You do it all the time,” I replied absently, smoothing back a strand of hair. The wind had picked up, warm and whispery. The smell of lilacs overlaid the logic. The scent of mint—vision, thought or memory?
“Do what?”
“Interpret facts to suit yourself.”
He started to say something else but I squeezed my eyes shut, waggled both hands and pressed my palms against my face. What was it?
I broke into a jog to my car, opened the door and slid across the seat to rescue the folder I’d tossed there.
“We’ll use my vehicle if you have no objections.” Johnny’s voice, still stiff.
“Fine,” I said, climbing back out to spread open the file on the roof of my c
ar. The wind ruffled the pages. I could hear the whimpers again, faint like falling petals from another time.
“I suggest we begin the hunt in the areas not already covered. They’ve already searched the backyards and empty buildings, the school, within a grid.” He spoke in methodical policeman mode.
“I want to go here,” I said and underlined the address with an imperative finger.
“On Garden Street?” He pulled a street map from a jacket pocket and studied the perimeters outlined in different colors and search codes. “That’s close to the playground. Already been checked.”
“Obviously, you were never taunted and hunted as a child. One hides like a wounded animal. I know.”
“Not as a kid, no.”
I stared up at him, not really seeing him. For all I knew, really, we were hours too late. “Sergeant, we don’t have much time. Will you take me or not?”
“Stop looking at me in that Delphic way, Lillie. We go.”
29.
A tidy white clapboard story and a half dwelling with smart green shutters matched the street number. Leaving Johnny to pound on the green painted front door and go through the formalities, I sidestepped past a matching green sedan and loped down the unpaved drive that led to the outbuildings and sheds visible at the back. Lilacs, purple and white, sweet with spring and heavy with the ache of memory, struggled with untrimmed cedar saplings to hedge the long narrow lot.
By the style of its sagging doors and roofline, the shingled garage had been a carriage shed at one time. The smaller shed that leaned against one side had, at a guess, once housed a flock of chickens. A lean-to tool shed on the other side justified its name. All three appeared to have dispensed with their sills and were slowly submerging into weeds. A rank of firewood covered by a ragged orange tarp blocked the entrance to the garage.
Between the sheds and the house was a wishing well, the kind with the quaint little shingled roof. It was perched in the middle of a central flower bed, guarded by a stiff circle of red and yellow tulips.
Johnny came down past the pots of geraniums lining the back steps. A tidy woman in her late sixties, a plastic basket on her hip, banged the aluminum door behind her. She paused to shake her head in our direction and stomped over to reel in the line of towels and flowered sheets snapping on the clothesline.
The woman’s domain evidently didn’t include the sheds, because everything else in the yard was exceptionally tidy. The beds on either side of the steps, unlike mine, were cleared of their winter trash and displayed grape hyacinths and gold, white and purple crocuses in tidy clumps, precisely spaced.
Over the rhythmic screech of the pulley, Johnny said, “As far as she knows the sheds are always locked and she doesn’t know where the keys are. The owner’s her father. He’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, she says, and forgets where he puts things. He’s been very agitated by the crying. He demanded she call and put in a complaint. She hasn’t heard anything herself.”
A neighbor chose that moment to start up his lawn mower. I winced. “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said, after the sound reduced to a low roar. “Though Sunday’s usually the day for mechanical goat grazing.”
“I notice she wears a hearing aid,” said Johnny. “Maybe she wasn’t on the weekend.”
With increasing urgency, I coursed the yard like a douser, straining for a sense of direction, for place, for a thread of energy, but I couldn’t see a sign of mint, not anywhere. Yet the sound of crying and my instant of cloudy clairvoyance had carried with it the smell of mint.
In spite of what I’d told Sullivan, I was in my fashion hunting by scent, after all.
Johnny paced beside me but had the wisdom not to speak and distract me with questions.
I found it more by common sense than any exercise of Talent. But then, I was looking for the living, not the dead.
Old properties, before the town laid water mains, relied on their own wells. I had found mint beside the old well in the private cemetery. I transplanted that mint beside the sundial that stood over the capped well in my garden. Wells. Here was a well.
I stretched over the rows of tulips and bent to look in the wishing well.
Which wasn’t an ornamental fake, after all, not entirely. The hood protected a genuine well—and the well didn’t have a cover. The circle yawed open. Below in the dungeon darkness, down past the brick casing and the mortared iron rungs, I caught a glimmer that moved.
“Tiffany?” I called.
A whisper answered. Impossibly faint, hoarse, but definitely not an echo: “Help me.”
“Johnny! She’s alive!” I screamed it.
He was already calling for rescue. I dropped to my knees and hung over the octagonal wooden sides of the little structure, babbling down reassurances, both vocal and sub vocal. Just hang on, sweetheart. We’ve found you. We’ll get you out of there. It won’t be long. We’ll get you out. Just hang on.
“What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my flower bed! You’re tramping my tulips.”
I bounced the back of my head off the ornamental roof and craned around. The daughter stood behind me at the edge of the flower bed, fists on hips.
“There’s a child fallen in. A little girl’s down there.”
“Nonsense! This ghost business, it’s all in Father’s mind.”
“No ghost. A real child. Couldn’t you hear her? And why wasn’t this well covered or filled in as it’s supposed to be?”
She crossed her arms and jerked her chin. “The wood rotted. I took it off last week to have Gerald make a replacement just like the old one. There will never be ghosts here. I know how to keep them off. You get out of my flower bed.”
I gaped at her. Perhaps her father wasn’t the one suffering from degenerative brain disease.
Johnny picked the woman up by the elbows and set her out of the way. He heaved up the wishing well and flung it aside. Clods of earth tumbled off the edge. I heard a splash below followed by a thin wail.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that? I could have dug the earth away first!” I snarled, scrambling with him to scoop the bank of soil from the lip before any more dropped down on the child’s head.
“We can’t get at her with it in place,” Johnny snarled back.
He rounded on the woman. “You had this thing off, didn’t you? It had to be wide open to the skies on Saturday. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”
I flung myself down and peered over the edge, calling down apologies and crooning encouragement. With the wishing well gone, I could see more clearly. She clung to the side of the well, waist deep in water, about twelve feet down. Two bloody days in a black hellhole, a cylindrical coffin. Alone. All because of that idiot woman. It was a miracle the child was alive.
I reached down and jiggled at the first rung. Maybe I could climb down to her. It grated and moved under my fingers.
I saw something else. The well was too narrow, the diameter too small, for any of the rescue crew to operate effectively unless they’d shrunk the lot from the last time I’d seen them. And I didn’t think she had the strength to hold on much longer. Certainly not to get herself into any kind of harness. They’d have to find a smaller person. That would take way too much precious time; as it was, her aura was fragile, a dull and cloudy thing.
But there was me. I reassured myself. It’s for a child. I can do this.
I scrambled to my feet. Dropped my cap on the ground and dropped my car keys in it. Took off my jacket and tied the sleeves around my neck.
When the rescue crew ran into the yard carrying their gear, I simply indicated the circumference of the space with my hands and pointed a thumb at my chest.
“She can’t last much longer. She’s holding on by a thread as it is. I’m all you’ve got,” I said urgently. The crew chief measured the size of the shaft in one quick glance and nodded. Beautiful man. I didn’t have to plead and argue, after all.
They didn’t waste time or words. They set up their tripod, set their an
chors, buckled me into a harness with curt instructions on what went where and helped ease me over the side. All before Johnny—busy with a garble of radio messages, the screaming woman who kept charging at everyone and the old man who would appeared on the porch with his walker—realized my intent.
Johnny’s face loomed above me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Get the hell out of my light,” I said and nodded to the crew chief. As they lowered me foot by creeping foot, I wanted to scream at them to hurry. More dirt showered down from above, not much, but enough for my fear of tight places to rise like bile in my throat. The scrape of my boots against the side of the well sounded like claws inside a sarcophagus and my mind pushed to dance and gibber with the sliding shadows created by the sudden illumination of the portable spotlight. I thought I had learned long ago to control my claustrophobia. Seems I was wrong.
The child, think of the child.
The water was stinking cold. My feet sank into a foot of muck and struck an uneven bottom that gave and crunched uneasily beneath my weight. The water rose past my knees, crept to my thighs and stopped at my waist.
“Hi, Tiffany,” I said to the dazed and grimy little face at the level of my breast. “My name’s Lillie. Let’s see if I can get you out of here.”
I grabbed the water bottle they’d lowered behind me along with a second set of harness and held it to her lips. She could barely swallow.
“Please,” she croaked, “…can you take the kitten too?”
That’s when I realized that two pairs of eyes peered up at me beseechingly and that the bedraggled black collar around her neck was a cat.
While I wrestled with buckles and straps in the confined space—she was actually sitting on a ledge, a shelf of rock, not standing as I first thought—she told me in the same halting hoarse whisper that she’d climbed down the ladder’s rungs to save the little cat and they’d broken off when she’d tried to climb back up. I had seen the gap on my way down, the rusty anchors loose and dangling. It seemed important to her that I understand the reason for her present predicament.
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